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Revived at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the notorious opera director’s take stirs sympathy for Salome, but leans on some of his theatrical hobby-horses

Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of Missy Mazzoli's opera, which the company co-commissioned, has strong, dramatic, expressive music throughout, but the story lacks continuity. 

Lyric Opera of Chicago revives its diverting and divisive 2015 original production by Barbara Gaines, who does it like a Shakespearean sex farce. 

Through brilliant singing and layered acting, Javier Camarena, Mané Galoyan, and Igor Golovatenko drive a Rigoletto to warm a traditionalist's heart. 

Claus Guth's production foregrounds the regimented, repressive world that drives the plot of Janáček’s tragic masterpiece.

A revival of Richard Jones’ production of Handel’s emotionally probing opera. 

Fellow Travelers is shot through with darkness, making for a chilling performance by Lyric Opera of Chicago. 

Chicago's new Faust is a quest for youth but also a reflection on insipiration, fabrication and manipulation. 

Synergies between singers compensated for accurate but unexciting orchestral playing.

David Pountney's new production of Die Walküre for the Lyric Opera of Chicago incisively charts the tectonic shift of control over the future from Wotan to Brünnhilde.

The Lyric Opera’s new production of Rigoletto evokes visually the contours and high-contrast relief of a surrealist painting. 

Dance takes center stage in Lyric Opera of Chicago's bold season-opening co-production of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice.

Of all the mischievous dramatic reversals that line Rigoletto’s plot – the hunchbacked jester tricked into abducting his own daughter, the daughter tricked into loving the brainless Duke (posing as a penniless student), and the terrifying reunion of father and daughter in a scene of murder – is not the most breathtaking, after all, the fact that the opera begins with a convincing display of the de

On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge.

On Monday night – and, one might guess from the way the opera crowd gripped their collars as they swept into the Civic Opera House, the coldest night in Chicago this winter – a new La Bohème opened at the Lyric (it’s on loan from the San Francisco opera).

The human race craves comic relief... a universally accepted fact throughout the entire history of mankind. Comic books, sitcoms, comic theater... all seek to blissfully whisk us out of the doldrums and politics of today’s ever-busy society.

In Francisco Negrin’s production of Massenet’s Werther, currently at the Lyric Opera, the opera’s first scene appears through a semi-transparent screen upon which an image of a row of houses is projected. Then the screen rises, and we enter fully into the dream.